how do i construct a wormery?

Answer 1

Use a plastic rubber-maid type sweater box, with a lid. Drill holes in the bottom of the sweater box. Rip newspaper up into thin strips, fluff it and fill the sweaterbox with it. Put the box in your basement with a couple bricks under the corners. Moisten the newspaper, but don't make it so wet that it's dripping out the bottom. Buy 1 lb of redworms and put them in the center of the moist newspaper. Put your kitchen leftovers (vegetable peels, fruit leavings, but not bread, meat or dairy) in the center of the pile, tucking them under the newspaper as well. Put the plastic top onto the sweaterbox. Keep the worms fed and moist but not water logged. Soon your worms will be eating the kitchen leftovers (they love banana peels and melon rinds a lot) and pooping. When most of the newspaper is gone, remove 2/3rds of the worm poop and use it in your house plants or garden. Replace it with more shredded, moistened newspaper. Don't stress the worms out by taking a long time doing this, but separate out the worms from the worm poop that you'll be putting in your plants. If you take good care of them, they'll make babys and you'll have lots to give away, sell or make new boxes with.

Answer 2

The commercial ones work well but cost around eighty quid. You can make a similar thing out of those polystyrene containers that fish is delivered in. Ask a cafe or supermarket. You will need 3. Make one hole in the bottom of one for the worm juice to drain out of. Make several holes in the bottom of the other two for the worms to crawl up and down through. Stack them on top of each other with the one-holed one at the bottom on bricks at each corner with a container to collect the juice. Keep the lid on the top one. Add kitchen scraps to the middle container when they arise, with scrunched up paper if it gets soggy. You will need tiger worms. These are thin and striped pink and red. Get some from someone who already has a wormery, or you can sometimes find them in the garden. Look up a picture on the net to make sure you have the right type.

When the middle container is full, start filling the top one. Empty the worm juice periodically. It is good plant food, but needs to be diluted about 10 to 1. When the contents of the middle container have turned to nice brown compost use it on the garden, in pots or in a potting mix. Put the emptied container onto the top of the stack. Worms make great pets! Have fun.

Answer 3

To make a Wormery

You could use a large jamjar, but the worms tend to stay in the middle where you can't see them. Something narrow would be much better. There are commercially made wormeries on the market, but these are expensive, and copying them at home is difficult.

A good compromise is to use an old fish tank. Get a piece of hardboard as long as the tank and as wide as it is deep. Put it into the tank so that it blocks off a narrow section of the tank, and fix it into place using gaffer tape.

Now you can fill your wormery. It's most interesting to use different coloured soils in layers. Make sure at least some of the soil is rich in compost. It should be slightly damp, but nowhere near waterlogged. You'll need to add dead leaves, or fresh compost to the top of the wormery from time to time (but see Activities With Your Worms for ways to make this more interesting and educational).

Finding Worms

If you are squeamish about handling worms, it's probably best to practice when your children aren't around - the last thing you want is for them to pick up on your nervousness.

All you really need to do to get the worms is dig in the garden (or a park - but you should probably ask a friendly park-keeper first). However, you can make it more interesting by talking about where and when you'd be most likely to find worms - for instance, is it true that worms come out after it rains?

Once you've got your worms (you'll probably want half a dozen or so, depending on the size of your wormery), take the opportunity to have a good look at them. Talk about how long they are, what colour they are, and whether they are the same all the way along. Your children could draw or paint them - or watch out for our Mini-Beast Puppets activity.

Activities with Your Worms


Watch the way the soil gets mixed as the worms burrow
Put leaves and other bits of organic material (for instance, bits of potato, orange peel, tea leaves) on the surface of the wormery - what happens to it? Do the worms prefer one thing over another?
Look out for worm casts on the surface. Can you work out what is happening?
What happens if you wet the soil?
Some people say they can call worms out of the soil using sounds or music. Can you devise an experiment to see if this is true? How can you make it a fair test?
If you can make more than one wormery, you could do a test to find out which food suits the worms best - which makes them grow most, for instance?
Check the soil for worm capsules - little brown pellets a couple of millimetres long. What do you think these might be? Watch what happens to them in time (to make this easier, put them in a jamjar lined with damp blotting paper - be sure not to let it dry out).
Find out more about worms at Worm World

Answer 4

check out your local garden center,